Moderna Taiwan Co (莫德納台灣) has begun recruiting participants for its flu vaccine trial and expects to disclose the results in March next year, the company said yesterday.
Taiwan is the only Asian country where US-based Moderna Inc is conducting clinical trials for its flu vaccine.
Moderna Taiwan is collaborating with eight hospitals or medical centers for the enrollment, but it has not set a target number of participants as the clinical trial uses competitive enrollment, which means when a target number of subjects have been meet, all enrollment ceases, general manager Joyce Lee (李宜真) told a media briefing in Taipei.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“We should be able to have some readout of the human test in March next year. This [rate of human test] is comparatively high, as speed is in the DNA of Moderna, which utilizes messenger RNA technology,” Lee said.
Taiwan is also the first Asian market to introduce Moderna’s BA.4/BA.5-adapted bivalent vaccine for COVID-19, she added.
Moderna Taiwan aims to introduce the latest mRNA technology to Taiwan and would try to participate in as many multination clinical trials by its parent company as possible, Lee said.
Launched in September, Moderna Taiwan is recruiting more staff for business and marketing, with an eye to increasing the number of employees to 10 next year, Lee said.
Asked if Moderna would continue supplying Taiwan with its latest COVID-19 vaccine, Patrick Bergstedt, Moderna’s senior vice president and head of emerging markets, said that the company is in talks with all stakeholders, including the Ministry of Health and Welfare.
“We need to remember that we are not dealing with the same coronavirus that caused the pandemic in 2020 — the virus has evolved,” Bergstedt said.
The world cannot assume that COVID-19 will be the last global pandemic, so Moderna is researching and developing vaccines for 15 viruses that are emerging or have been ignored, but might cause the greatest health threat to human beings by 2025, Bergstedt said.
Overall, Moderna would focus on respiratory viruses, he said.
The company is also researching non-invasive vaccines, which might be administered in the form of a nasal spray or patch, he added.
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